Sebastian Thrun

Why organisations work with Sebastian Thrun

• He has shipped autonomous AI at production scale. The Stanford team he led won the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005, and the Google self-driving project he co-founded became Waymo.
• He built the playbook that boards now ask about. Google X, founded under his leadership, codified moonshot methodology for capital-intensive technology bets.
• He has direct experience reskilling enterprise workforces in AI, data and cloud through Udacity, including programmes for IBM, Mercedes-Benz and Google before the 2024 acquisition by Accenture.
• He explains AI without dumbing it down. Senior audiences leave with a working sense of what current systems can and cannot do, and where the real operational risk sits.

Biography highlights

• Co-founder of Google X and the Google self-driving car project that became Waymo
• Led the Stanford Racing Team whose vehicle Stanley won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge; Stanley now sits in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History
• Co-founder and chairman of Udacity, acquired by Accenture in 2024 to power the LearnVantage reskilling platform
• Co-founder and former CEO of Kitty Hawk, the eVTOL “flying car” company backed by Larry Page
• Member of the National Academy of Engineering and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina; Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award (Education, 2012)
• Co-author of Probabilistic Robotics (MIT Press), the standard graduate text on the mathematics behind autonomous systems

Biography

Stanley crossed the finish line of the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge after 132 miles of desert, the first autonomous vehicle to do so. The Stanford Racing Team that built it was led by Sebastian Thrun, then director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Stanley now sits in the Smithsonian. The technology grew into Waymo and the modern autonomous vehicle industry.

That arc, from research lab to production AI, is what makes his perspective valuable to senior teams. He gave up tenure at Stanford to become a Google Fellow, co-founded Google X, and built the moonshot model that boards now reference when they talk about long-horizon technology bets. Probabilistic Robotics, the textbook he co-authored with Wolfram Burgard and Dieter Fox, remains the standard graduate reference in the field.

The second half of his career addresses the constraint that most boards now feel acutely. Talent. Udacity, which he co-founded in 2012, built the Nanodegree model with employers including IBM, Mercedes-Benz and Google, then sold to Accenture in 2024 to anchor the LearnVantage reskilling platform. He also co-founded Kitty Hawk with Larry Page to commercialise eVTOL aircraft.

Audiences get something specific from him. A clear read on what current AI systems do well, where they fail, what production deployment actually requires, and how to build a workforce that can operate the technology rather than admire it.

Key speaking topics

• Production AI and autonomous systems
• Moonshot methodology and long-horizon technology bets
• AI workforce reskilling and the talent constraint
• The future of mobility and self-driving vehicles
• AI for the board and the executive committee
• Online learning and the economics of education

Ideal for

• Boards and executive committees moving from AI strategy to operating deployment
• CHROs and CLOs commissioning enterprise reskilling at scale
• Automotive, mobility and industrial leadership teams facing autonomy
• CTOs and chief AI officers benchmarking moonshot and R&D portfolios

Audience outcomes

• A working mental model of where current AI systems succeed and where they fail in production
• A concrete view of the workforce capability required to run AI inside a large organisation
• A read on how moonshot bets are structured, governed and shut down inside a serious technology company
• A clearer sense of where autonomy is heading in mobility, logistics and adjacent sectors